CNN Tailwind: updates and developments: Ted Turner claimed the NewsStand
story caused him to consider suicide and he offered to whip himself; the
Chairman of Time-Warner praised how CNN's top duo handled the
retraction; NewsStand producer April Oliver appeared on FNC while her
op-ed revealed a political agenda; fellow fired NewsStand producer Jack
Smith ran the CBS News Washington bureau during the Reagan years; and
Peter Arnett can't find poison in Iraq but he can 28 years later in a
U.S. plane.

-- In a Friday
night dispatch from the Television Critics Association meeting in
Pasadena, California Associated Press reporter Lynn Elber relayed Ted
Turner's distress:
"CNN founder Ted Turner issued a fervent
apology to U.S. veterans for the cable news channel's retracted report
about U.S. troops using deadly nerve gas in a 1970 Vietnam raid.
"'If committing mass suicide would help,
I've even given that some consideration. Nothing has upset me more
probably in my whole life,' Turner told a Television Critics Association
news conference Friday.
"'I'll take my shirt off and beat myself
bloody on the back' with a whip if it would do any good, he said,
adding: 'I couldn't hurt any more if I was bleeding.'...
"....Turner said the impact of the retracted
story hurt him emotionally more than his father's death, his divorces or
his Atlanta Braves baseball team losing to the New York Yankees in the
1996 World Series. 'I feel horrible about it. CNN was my baby from the
very beginning,' he said."

-- "I think
Chief Executive Tom Johnson has handled himself beautifully," the New
York Post quoted Time-Warner Chairman Gerald Levin as declaring on Friday.
He issued his assessment at a gathering of business leaders in Sun Valley,
Idaho. "I'm really proud of him," the Post reported he said of
Johnson. What about CNN/USA President Rick Kaplan? "The same with
Rick."

-- April Oliver can never go back again. No
matter what happens CNN is sure to never re-hire Oliver now that she has
committed the worst sin possible for a member of Ted Turner's team:
appearing on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel. Specifically, she
defended her story and lashed out at CNN as the the guest on FNC's Fox
NewsWatch on Saturday evening.
Oliver insisted on FNC that she had no political
agenda, but the tone of the last paragraphs of an op-ed piece by her which
ran in Sunday's Washington Post suggests otherwise. Referring to the
official CNN report by outside attorney Floyd Abrams and in-house counsel
David Kohler, Oliver charged:
"The Abrams/Kohler report was delivered to
support a corporate whitewash, driven by executive fear, to avoid further
controversy in the press, with the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. One of
the primary reasons CNN sacrificed this story was to protect its
relationship with the Pentagon.
"Tragically, the CNN retraction, driven by
enormous pressure and a hasty star chamber investigation, will paralyze
further reporting of these serious matters and of other past and, more
important, future black operations by America's secret army."

-- CNN's Jack
Smith directed CBS News coverage of Reagan. The July 10 CyberAlert quoted
Jack Smith, the dismissed Senior Producer of NewsStand, as charging that
CNN retracted his story because of a "too bloody cozy"
relationship with the military. I had not realized, until reading a July
10 Washington Post "Reliable Source" item on how ABC News
correspondent Jack Smith has been confused with CNN's Jack Smith, that
CNN's Jack Smith is the same Jack Smith who "was the CBS News
Washington Bureau Chief from 1981 to '87."
That goes a long way in explaining CBS's
anti-Reagan bias in the 1980s.

-- Finally, the
best quip of the weekend, from syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer on
Inside Washington in a discussion about CNN's Peter Arnett: "This
is the guy who spends ten years in Iraq, or almost a decade in Iraq since
the war in 1990, and never discovered poison gas. But he discovers it in
the U.S. military. It's pretty interesting by itself."

Developments were disclosed in two Clinton fundraising scandals on Friday
and on Saturday in the effort to see who violated Linda Tripp's privacy.
Actually, the actions occurred on Monday, Thursday and Friday, but since
the networks ignored them, I didn't learn about them until the Friday
and Saturday newspapers. Here's a rundown of the items, as reported in
the Washington Post:

-- "Probe of
DNC Donor Travel Ordered: FEC Must Pursue Claim of Sale of Trade Mission
Seats, Judge Says" read the July 10 headline over a story about a
judge taking action on a complaint from Judicial Watch. Reporter Bill
Miller explained:
"A federal judge has ordered the Federal
Election Commission to aggressively review a conservative group's
allegations that the Clinton administration and the Democratic National
Committee offered U.S. businesses places on overseas trade missions in
exchange for campaign contributions.
"U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin, in
ordering the agency to pursue what it said could be 'serious violations
of law,' criticized the FEC's decision not to pursue the case on its own
as 'inexplicable.'
"Although Sporkin's order, issued Monday,
does not reach any conclusions about whether the allegations are true, it
could rekindle the controversy surrounding whether seats were sold on
foreign trade missions in return for campaign contributions to the 1996
Clinton-Gore reelection effort...."

"Rekindle the
controversy"? Have you heard anything about this since last Monday?

-- "Gore
Friend Charged With Violating Law In 1993 FundRaising" announced
another July 10 Post headline. Reporter George Lardner Jr. began:
"Miami businessman Howard Glicken, a
prominent Democratic fundraiser and friend of Vice President Gore, was
charged yesterday with illegally soliciting and laundering $20,000 in
foreign money in 1993 for Democratic Senate campaigns.
"Government officials and Glicken's Miami
lawyer, Ed Shohat, said Glicken has agreed to plead guilty to two
misdemeanor violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act cited in a
criminal information filed in U.S. District Court here by the Justice
Department's campaign finance task force...."

-- "Judge
Orders Defense Official's Computer Seized in Tripp Probe" announced a
July 11 Post headline. Bill Miller opened the story about the latest in
how Tripp's 1969 arrest became public knowledge:
"A federal judge yesterday ordered the
Defense Department to seize and examine the computer of a Pentagon
official who has admitted releasing sensitive information contained on
Linda R. Tripp's security clearance form.
"U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said
he acted because the official, Clifford Bernath, deleted numerous
documents from his computer in the weeks after his release of information
to the New Yorker magazine. Although Bernath has said that none of the
deleted documents concerned Tripp, the judge ordered the Defense
Department's inspector general to check the computer's hard drive and
servers in hopes of retrieving all deleted material.
"'It is highly unusual and suspect for
such an action to have been undertaken by Bernath when matters relating to
Tripp are being investigated by the Office of the Independent Counsel,'
Lamberth declared in his ruling...."

The Washington
Times played the news at the top of the front page under the headline:
"Tripp Leaker's Computer Seized." Reporters Jerry Seper and
Bill Sammon added that Lamberth also ordered "Bernath to answer
questions about 'whether the White House played any role in the release
of this information.'"

Coverage:
Zilch about any of it Thursday or Friday evening or Friday morning. CNN
didn't even mention the Howard Glicken matter on Friday's Inside
Politics which featured a lengthy piece by Candy Crowley on Al Gore's
presidential campaign preparations.

On Friday, ABC led
with the GM strike, CBS and CNN went first with the court martial decision
in the Italian gondola incident, FNC with OJ Simpson's decision to
appeal the civil verdict and NBC was topped by a story on a study about
child poverty. (More on the NBC story in the next CyberAlert.) Only FNC
touched a Clinton scandal: David Shuster looked at the debate within the
Justice Department about whether to appeal the latest Secret Service
ruling. All ran stories on violence in Northern Ireland and the Medal of
Honor being given to a forgotten Vietnam War hero, but all also had plenty
of time for some less than pressing stories.

ABC's World News
Tonight: diving for champagne in the wreck of ship sunk off Sweden in
1916. Plus, the 200th anniversary of the Marine Band.
CBS Evening News: Cincinnati law allowing the
police to issue "exclusion" notices barring entry into
communities to which those ticketed had brought drugs or prostitution.
CNN's The World Today at 8pm ET: New England
Aquarium study of what turtles hear, and a 14-year-old female softball
player in suburban Chicago who refuses to wear a jersey bearing the name
of a liquor store.
NBC Nightly News: In Depth Special Report on
oceans with stories on the dangers from the warming of the Pacific Ocean,
how "sandy beaches in California are disappearing" from erosion
caused by beach development, and the danger of riptides.

Saturday night the
three broadcast networks led with the burial of the body of the now
identified unknown soldier from the Vietnam War. ABC found room for a full
story on a bull run in Nevada. NBC caught up with ABC and did a piece on
the Marine Band. It was such a slow news day for CNN that its 8pm ET The
World Today re-ran the piece on the study measuring turtle hearing, the
same story they played 24 hours earlier.

On Friday's Dennis Miller Live on HBO the host, a stand-up comedian and
sometime actor, as well as the more famous actress Sarah Jessica Parker,
lashed out at the evils of talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh.

In the opening
monologue of the July 10 show run live in the east at 11:30pm, Miller,
best-known as the former fake news reader on Saturday Night Live,
delivered these bits of liberal analysis disguised as biting jokes:
"The only thing greater than America's
love affair with talk radio is the love affair the hosts seem to have with
themselves. And no one is more full of himself, or for that matter more
fool, than Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh articulates the blindingly white anger
of every short-sleeved Wal-Mart assistant manager in America who is
outraged because a black kid called him by his first name."
"Limbaugh is emblematic of what's
wrong with the medium. It barely educates but only reinforces and
reaffirms the narrow-minded prejudices of both the host and the
listener."
"Many talk radio hosts are so misinformed
and play so fast and loose with the truth that they make Mein Kampf read
like the Farmer's Almanac."

Next, he sat down
with actress Sarah Jessica Parker, now starring in HBO's comedy series
Sex and the City. She's married to actor Matthew Broderick, the Matthew
in the quote below. After telling Miller that her parents would only allow
her to watch PBS as a child, so she supplemented it with radio, she
recounted how she still listens to talk shows:
"I get angry constantly. Matthew's always
saying why do you do this? Why? In fact the other night he said 'I have
to turn off the fascists, I can't listen to the fascists anymore,' but
it was fine because there was a radio in the other room with some other
fascists."

I believe she
lives in New York City, so you New Yorkers can guess which hosts they
consider "fascist."

Asked why she
tunes in to that awful commercial talk radio, she replied: "I don't
know whether it's like watching a car wreck. I can't explain it and
sometimes I think it's important to hear because I know what my politics
are and I think it's important to expose yourself. Sometimes you
actually do learn something, very often not. And plus which you know
it's just bizarre, it's freaking bizarre what people call up and say
and they have no information. They're completely ill-informed, they're
ignorant, they have no vocabulary. They're just like 'I'm
right.'"

She listens
though, explaining, "The people whose opinion I'm interested in
hearing who are, who read and expose themselves to the world and not just
like some problem that you know Rush says is important, they don't call
because they don't have time because they're either reading, they're
working, they're cooking, they're doing something else that's like
far more important than sitting there waiting."

Reading the New
York Times and watching PBS, no doubt.

Getting to
Limbaugh specifically, they delivered this tag team attack denouncing him:
Miller: "It's so metronomic. Put it this
way, I'm starting to bend on Clinton. For years I've been a pretty
vociferous critic but you know you look at it and you look at the country
and you look at the spirit of the people and you gotta start thinking
I'm an asshole if I don't move on a little and give this guy his due,
but Limbaugh, every day, every problem..."
Parker, cutting him off: "It's too
depressing. The show depresses me. I think, what's so depressing, what I
like least about him is he's really un, he's uninterested in listening
to other opinions and I think he's missing the whole point of being an
American -- the debate, the democracy, and you know what it really means.
It's like he's got this tiny little myopic view of the world and
he's just not, and it's like all just 'liberal: bad.' You know and
it's just too cut and dry."

A mindset formed
by PBS and reinforced by the "really balanced" NPR. Our tax
dollars at work. -- Brent Baker[1]

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